Five-minute rationality techniques

I knew I was going to stay on LessWrong when I read the conceptually & rhetorically brilliant:

Ignorance exists in the map, not in the territory. If I am ignorant about a phenomenon, that is a fact about my own state of mind, not a fact about the phenomenon itself. A phenomenon can seem mysterious to some particular person. There are no phenomena which are mysterious of themselves. To worship a phenomenon because it seems so wonderfully mysterious, is to worship your own ignorance.

Which could be perhaps reduced to something like:

Your thoughts are your map; reality is the territory. Watch your step.

and

Mystery is always in the mind, never in the matter.

I don't think these are all that great but I would love a snappy way to express this central insight.

From Avoiding Your Belief's Real Weak Points:

"To do better: When you're doubting one of your most cherished beliefs, close your eyes, empty your mind, grit your teeth, and deliberately think about whatever hurts the most. Don't rehearse standard objections whose standard counters would make you feel better. Ask yourself what smart people who disagree would say to your first reply, and your second reply. Whenever you catch yourself flinching away from an objection you fleetingly thought of, drag it out into the forefront of your mind. Punch yourself in the solar plexus. Stick a knife in your heart, and wiggle to widen the hole."

Condensed: If you catch yourself flinching away from a thought because it's painful, focus on that thought and don't let it go. If the truth hurts, it should.

This is, I think, some of the most important rationalist advice I ever got. It kept me reading OB when it was getting very painful to do so, and allowed me to finally admit that my religion was immoral, a thought I had kept tucked away in rationalization-land since middle school.

Hi. I'm new here. Great blog. Great post.

One maxim that I rely on for acting rationally is "know what your time is worth". In my first real job, I was on a one-week project with a scientist who told me that my time is valuable (I think he was implying that my boss was wasting my time). This really opened up my eyes. My first application of this idea was professionally -- I can get more out of my job than just a paycheck. I can learn skills and make contacts and list accomplishments that will advance my career. I can also enjoy what I do (I'm a researcher, so that's assumed in my profession). It's sad to see colleagues who think that their time is worth no more than some measly paycheck.

The second application of this rule was in my "home economy". I used to be very cheap. Now that I've placed a $ value on my time, it puts a lot of activities in perspective and I am much freer spending money when it frees up time for more worthwhile pursuits (it helps that my cheap habits assure that I always have a nice cushion of cash around. This way, I am able to spend money when needed, without reworking my budget -- which would be a real waste of my precious time). It's sad to see people earning $70,000 a year fretting over a dollar. It's also sad to see someone who has something big to contribute to society (such as a teacher or researcher, for example) worrying about how to recycle 1/10 ounce of plastic.

This rule ties in with the "comparative advantage" rule mentioned above.

The other maxim that I like is "question reality". It is basically a directive to question your own beliefs, ask "is this real?" It applies to everything, and it subsumes the traditional "Question authority" maxim, because unjust authority typically depends upon people being indoctrinated with a particular view of reality.

Thanks for reading. I look forward to participating in this site!

Great idea for a post and an important topic. A somewhat similar topic came up at our recent Chicago meetup, when someone who saw our sign came up to us to ask us what Less Wrong referred to. We didn't necessarily have a great answer at the ready besides relaying some of the basics (website/group blog about rationality and thinking better, etc.). We spent a few minutes afterward talking about what information a good LW elevator speech might include. We didn't want it to sound too stilted/formal, e.g., "refining the art of human rationality" from the banner at the top doesn't sound that inviting in casual conversation. Does anyone have approaches that have worked?

Eliezers "Absence of evidence is evidence of absence" is a good one in my opinion, and relatively easy to explain the relevant maths to pretty much anyone.

The general point about Conservation of Expected Evidence is then likely to come out in the wash (and is a very useful idea).

A simple technique I used to use was that whenever I started to read or found a link for an article that made me uncomfortable or instinctively want to avoid it, I forced myself to read it. After a few times I got used to it and didn't have to do this anymore.

Should we be listing the oldies here as well? One of my favorites is still "Don't believe everything you think."

That one made it to book-title and t-shirt status, but I've never heard anyone actually say it. I've read it only a couple of times.

I think it is mostly hopeless trying to teach rationality to most people.

For example, both of my parents studied Math in university and still have a very firm grip of the fundamentals.

I just got a phone call yesterday from my father in Germany saying: "We saw in the news, that a German tourist couple got killed in a shooting in San Francisco. Will you avoid going out after dark?" When I tried to explain that I won't update my risk estimates based on any such singular event, he seemed to listen to and understand formally what I said. Anyhow, he was completely unimpressed, finishing the conversation in an even more worried tone: "I see, but you will take care, won't you?"

Consider the possibility that when people say they're seeing things differently than you do, that they might be telling you the truth. They could be making it up, they could be just annoying you for the fun of it, but they might actually be weirder than you think.

Don't ingest words from a poisoned discourse unless you have a concrete reason to think you're immune.

Politics is often poisoned deliberately. Other topics are sometimes poisoned accidentally, by concentrated confusion. Gibberish is toxic; if you bend your mind to make sense of it, your whole mind warps slightly. You see concentrated confusion every time you watch a science fiction show on television; their so-called science is actually made from mad libs. Examples are everywhere; do not assume that there is meaning beneath all confusion.

The most important thing I learned from this site:

If you suspect something is factually true, don't be afraid to believe it. It can't hurt you.

That's simple. Not easy to implement, but easy to express.

Someone gets in a car-crash and barely misses being impaled by a metal pole, and people say it's a million-to-one miracle

I like to reply to such accounts with "Luckier not to have been in the crash in the first place."

Whenever you're uncertain about an issue where bias might play a role, ask yourself honestly what you would say if you knew that if you gave the wrong answer, rabid leopards would storm into the room and eat you.

No method of explanation should be considered good unless it's been tested on a number of ordinary people.

My impression is that the best way to explain Goodhart's Law is to bring up employee incentive plans which don't have the effect the employer was hoping for.

Candidate 1: "If a trillion trillion trillion people each flip a hundred coins, someone's going to get all heads." ("If a trillion people each flip a billion coins" might be a stronger meme, though extremely inaccurate.)

Candidate 2: "Knowing the right answer is better than being the first to argue for it."

Candidate 3: "If it moves, you can test it."

I'd like to come up with something meme-sized about curiosity stoppers. How about:

When you pretend to know an answer, you're wrong twice.

It doesn't get the subtleties across, but it might be enough to gain a foothold in the average person's mind.

As I think has been mentioned in this thread by others, but bears repeating, if you want to convince people that they are affected by cognitive biases sometimes you have to really hit them over the head with them.

I've found the examples in Hindsight Devalues Science and the basketball video (I don't imagine there are many people here who haven't seen it, but I'll not post a spoiler just in case). Are particularly effective at this. I guess calibration tests would also be good on this metric. Once you've pointed out a "cortical illusion" like this, most people are genuinely interested as to how it works.

On the other hand, I've found that explaining about results where you have to say "studies show that people tend to biased in direction y" is much harder than explaining about results in which you can say "remember that experiment we just did, where you were biased in direction y?".

Eg, it's nearly impossible to convince someone that they would anchor their guess of how many African countries are in the UN to the last two digits of their phone number. Even if you tell them that everyone does it, they'll assume they're an exception.

Any more examples of biases that you can "hit people over the head with" in this manner?

Here's something that comes up in many, many discussions of climate change and anything else where a lot of arguments come from models or simulations: sometimes you have to do the math to make a valid (counter-)argument.

Example:

A: ...And so you, see, as CO2 increases, the mean global temperature will also increase.

B: That's bullshit, and here's why: as CO2 increases, there will be more photosynthesis -- and the increased plant growth will consume all that extra CO2.

Another example (the one that motivated this comment):

A: And so, as long as the bus is carrying six or more passengers, it'll be more efficient than the passenger-equivalent number of cars.

B: That's bullshit! Buses are ten times heavier than cars, so it's got to be ten or more bus passengers.

People often think that in discussions of quantitative phenomena, it's enough to make arguments based purely on directional drivers/phenomena, when really the magnitudes of those drivers are hugely important. Of course there are negative feedbacks, countervailing forces, etc., but (a) usually they're already dealt with in the original model and so B isn't telling anyone anything new, and (b) magnitude matters.

Think about your judgments of confidence in terms of frequencies instead of probabilities - our frequency intuitions tend to be much closer to reality. If you estimate that you're 90% sure of something, ask "if I faced ten similar problems, would I really get nine of them right?"

Counter-argument:

"Less Wrong tends toward long articles with a lot of background material. That's great, but the vast majority of people will never read them. What would be useful for raising the sanity waterline in the general population is a collection of simple-but-useful rationality techniques that you might be able to teach to a reasonably smart person in five minutes or less per technique."

Possible alternative angle of attack - get people to read longer articles. Promote things that increase attention span, for example. Admittedly, you then need to return to this topic, as you need short simple ways to advocate for whatever you think increases attention span (personally I think meditation looks promising).

I think "unknown unknowns" is a good one for this sort of thing. My attempt follows:

We know a lot of things, and generally we know that we know them. These are "known knowns." I know that 1+1 = 2, I know that the year is 2010, and so on.

We also don't know a lot of things, but generally we know that we don't know them-- for example, I don't know the hundredth digit of pi, I don't know how to speak Chinese, and I don't know what stocks are going to do well next year. All of those things are "known unknowns," or unanswered questions. However, because we know what the questions are, it's possible for us to solve them, or at least approach some kind of solution, if we anticipate needing one. If I knew I was going to be quizzed on the hundredth digit of pi, I could look it up or calculate it; if I knew I was going to have to speak Chinese, I could buy a course on it and at least learn the basics; if I knew I was going to need to make stock predictions, I could look at market trends and try to extrapolate what might happen in the future. The fact that I know that I don't know these things allows me to take action to correct that lack of knowledge. So while known unknowns can be bad, we can at least plan around them and minimize their potential impact on our lives.

However, there are also things that we not only don't know, we don't know that we don't know them. There are questions out there that we haven't even considered or thought about. Not only do we not know what the answers to the questions are, we don't even know the questions themselves. These things are "unknown unknowns," and they are very, very dangerous, because there's no way we can plan for them.

For example, Japan in late World War II had a plan for fighting the US if it invaded Japan with ground troops, and Japan also had a plan for fighting the US if it bombed Japan with conventional air raids. But Japan did not have a plan for fighting the US if it bombed Japan with nuclear weapons, because Japan did not know that nuclear weapons existed, much less that the US actually had them. Nuclear weapons, for Japan in World War II, were an unknown unknown.

If I only have a few minutes, I tell people to study cognitive bias, in the hope that surely any intelligent person can see that understanding what science has to say about the systematic, predictable failings of our own brains can hardly fail to be useful. You need long enough to impart the caution that you have to apply these things to yourself, not just to other people...

*Candidate 1 requires intuitive understanding of probability, fat chance.

*Candidate 2 would require a rewiring of humans about the system how status is perceived.

*Candidate 3 just does not work. Talk with people about the image they have what scientists do all day. It is bad. Especially when you go to New Agers.

Maybe you assume that people have a consistent world view, or at least the desire to have one, but no. Please try the proposals on real people, and report back. I expect you to run into the problem that objective truth is widely not accepted, and few care to have correct beliefs about the world anyway.

Here my suggestions

• rate topics in money, as a way to figure out how much time to spend on decision making.

Spend more time on expensive or repeated expenses, less time on cheap single ones.

• seek out good counterarguments for whichever position you find

That saved me a few times. Look for rebuttals habitually, avoid the confirmation bias. Gets harder with fringe topic.

• write things down

Thats not so much rationality, but practical advice.

• checklists

They are easy to explain, lead to better results. Can be tweaked in some ways to make them even better.

• habit of reviewing after an event => learning from mistakes

How to make new mistakes instead of repeating the old ones. Learning from experience in a more efficient way.

There are some articles here that can be summed up in short. But that will probably not work, because interest in techniques is not particularly widespread. You are subject to inferential distance. When an article seems trivial to you after a few reads & ponderings that indicates that you understood it. Also there is the annoying uncanny valley of rationality, where a little of it just hurts, or gets applied wrong (ever discussed a high-iq person who happens to be religious?).

What are your own favorite techniques that you actually apply?

My idea would be to give a truncated version of a point made in Truly Part of You.

The different sound-bite ways to say it are:

• True knowledge regenerates.
• Only believe something once you recognize how you would learn it some other way.
• Your beliefs should be unaffected by your choice of labels.

Low inferential distance explanation: When learning about something, the most important thing is to notice what you've been told. Not understand, but notice: what kinds of things would you expect to see if you believed these claims, versus if you did not? Are you being told about some phenomenon, or just some labels? Once you've noticed what you're being told, think about how it plugs in with the rest of your knowledge: what implications does this body of knowledge have for other fields, and vice versa? What discoveries in one area would force you to believe differently in the others? When you can answer these questions, you have a meaningful, predictive model of the world that can be phrased under any choice of labels.

(Aside: When you are at the stage where most of your knowledge regenerates, I call that the highest level of understanding.)

Btw, I had seen this in open thread and been thinking about a response, and this is what I settled on.

Show someone the gorilla video, or another of the inattentional blindness tests.

Telling someone their brain is a collection of hacks and kludges is one thing; showing them, having them experience it, is on another level altogether.

Relatedly, my favorite quote from Egan's Permutation City: "You have to let me show you exactly what you are."

1. mā "mother"
2. má "hemp"
3. mǎ "horse"
4. mà "scold"
5. ma (an interrogative particle)

Anti-candidate: "Just because something feels good doesn't make it true."

The Litany of Tarski and Litany of Gendlin are better ways to approach this concept, because they're both inexorably first-person statements.

Candidate: Don't pursue an idea unless it came to your attention by a method that actually finds good ideas. (Paraphrased from here.)

"Let's see how we can check this" or "let's see how we can test this" seems to work in the short run to get people to check or test things. I don't know if it changes habits.

RE: Candidate 1

For those interested, here's the math:

• A one in N chance event will not occur with probability 1-1/N.
• It will not occur after 2 trials with probability (1-1/N)^2.
• It will occur at least once after 2 trials with probability 1-(1-1/N)^2
• It will occur at least once after k trials with probability 1-(1-1/N)^k.
• For an even chance for it to occur at least once, how many trials do we need?
• We solve for k in this equation:
• 1-(1-1/N)^k = 0.5
• (1-1/N)^k = 0.5
• taking logs of both sides
• k = ln 0.5/ln (1-1/N)
• dividing by N
• k/N = ln 0.5 / ln(1-1/N)^N
• (1-1/N)^N tends to e^-1 (since (1+x/N)^N tends to e^x, let x=-1)
• so ln(1-1/N)^N tends to -1. The convergence is pretty fast. So is reliable for large N.
• so k/N = -ln 0.5 = ln 2 which is about 0.7
• so k=0.7N

Example for a one-in-a-million chance event, after 700,000 trials, you would have even chance of seeing at least one occurrence.

In general for a one-in-a-N chance event, there is an even chance that you would see at least one occurrence after 0.7N trials.

And of course, you can choose another probability instead of 0.5 too.

(Since I'm no mathematician, there may be mistakes in there somewhere. Please feel free to suggest corrections.)

Count to ten.

Learning one was wrong (and updating) is a good thing.

One should be more interested in obtaining information than winning debates.

To clarify a little on candidate 1. People are often impressed by a coincidental or unlikely happening, and think that it's some kind of miracle. But in fact there are a lot of individually very unlikely things happening all the time. Out of all the cars in the world, what's the chance that you happen to see three of them in a particular order going down a particular street? Not that high, but obviously cars have to pass you in some order or other.

So all unlikely events can be categorised into unnoticable ones (any three cars at random), and noticable ones (your mum, your music teacher, and somebody you haven't seen for ten years all pass you in order.) You then calculate the odds of that particular unlikely thing happening, and discover it's pretty unlikely. The thing most people don't take into account is that there are a LOT of potential noticable events, and there are a LOT of possible moments when they could happen. Any particular unlikely happening is pretty unlikely, but the likelihood of one of the many noticable unlikely happenings occurring is much greater.

This accords with our experience that noticable unlikely events do actually occur. But there's nothing unlikely about that fact.

(I definitely should have thought of this earlier; interestingly enough it was this comment that was the trigger.)

Use probabilities! (Or likelihood ratios.) Especially when arguing. Yes, do so with care, i.e. without deceiving yourself into thinking you're better calibrated than you are -- but hiding the fact that you're not perfectly calibrated doesn't make your calibration any better. You brain is still making the same mistakes whether you choose to make them verbally explicit or not. So instead of reacting with indignation when someone disagrees, just ask "how confident are you?" Then, if necessary, follow up with "what was your prior?" "How many bits of evidence is this piece of information worth?" Make your argument a numerical game rather than a barefaced status war.

People often profess to be uncomfortable with assigning a numerical value to their confidence level. I have found, strangely enough, that switching from percentages (or values between 0 and 1) to something that feels more "discrete", like a scale of 0 to 10 or a "five-star" system, sometimes helps with this.

Terry Pratchett has a good metaphor for a good way of thinking in his Tiffany Aching books. Second, third, etc thoughts. Basically the idea that you shouldn't just trust whatever your thoughts say, you have your second thoughts monitoring them. And then you have your third thoughts monitoring that. I've always found it extremely helpful to pay attention to what I'm thinking; many times I've noticed a thought slipping past that is very obviously wrong and picked myseld up on it. A few times I've even agreed with the original thought upon further analysis, but analysis that it definitely needed.

I'm not sure the second thoughts metaphor is the best way for explaining it to people mind you. Perhaps something such as "Pay attention to what you're thinking, you'll be surprised how often you disagree with your own first thought."

I think movements grow at their margins. It is there that we can make the greatest impact. So perhaps we should focus on recent converts to rationality. Figure out how they converted, what factors were involved, how the transition could have been easier, taking into account their personality etc.

This is what I have been trying to do with the people I introduce rationality to and who are somewhat receptive. It is not only a victory that they began to accept rationality. It was also an opportunity to observe how best to foster more of such conversions.

It is somewhat worrying that these people tend to be geeks/nerds. But given the nature of rationality itself and personality, this shouldn't be too surprising. The success of geek/nerd culture in recent mainstream pop culture is a cause for hope I think, even though some geeks/nerds will argue their culture have been distorted in the process. What matters is that the public are now not averse to geeks/nerds. Such aversion is often the first and strongest impediment to begin even considering topics such as rationality.

It ultimately comes down to social acceptance. We must leverage the phenomenon by focusing on the fringes of the rationality demographic. They have the most power to effect peer pressure to convert further rationalists.

I've heard Candidate 1 expressed as "A one-in-a-million shot happens a thousand times a day in China."

Candidate 2 could be "I like to be less wrong."

Candidate 3 maybe "If it affects reality, it is real."?

That Candidate 2 (admitting that one is wrong is a win for an argument), is one of my oldest bits of helpful knowledge.

If one admits that one is wrong, one instantly ceases to be wrong (or at lest ceases to be wrong in the way that one was wrong. It could still be the case that the other person in an argument is also wrong, but for the purposes of this point, we are assuming that they are "correct"), because one is then in possession of more accurate (i.e. "right") information/knowledge.

http://rejectiontherapy.com/ - the 30 day rejection challenge seems to fit here. Try and, for 30 consecutive days, provoke genuine rejections or denials of reasonable requests, as part of your regular activities, at the rate of one per day.

Similarly, with millions of people dying of cancer each year, there are going to be lots of people making highly unlikely miracle recoveries. If they didn't, that would be surprising.

That's saying it's surprising that nobody lives to the age of 150. Miracle cancer cures are statistical outliers and it would be interest to know the mechanism that allows them to happen.

This is an obvious contradiction: they're claiming a measurable effect on the world and then pretending that it can't possibly be measured.

It's no contraction if you believe in a clever god that doesn't want that the effect gets scientifically measured.

I'm surprised there aren't any comments about reminding people they can't have it both ways. I haven't found a great way to do it quickly, but I have sometimes talked people down from forming a negative opinion (of a person, group, or event) by asking them if they would have gotten the same perception from a counterfactual (and in some sense opposite) event occurring instead.

Candidate: Hold off on proposing solutions.

This article is way more useful than the slogan alone, and it's short enough to read in five minutes.

'Instinct,' 'intuition,' 'gut feeling,' etc. are all close synonyms for 'best guess.' That's why they tend to be the weakest links in an argument-- they're just guesses, and guesses are often wrong. Guessing is useful for brainstorming, but if you really believe something, you should have more concrete evidence than a guess. And the more you base a belief on guesses, the more likely that belief is to be wrong.

Substantiate your guesses with empirical evidence. Start with a guess, but end with a test.

Upvoted for raising a very important topic.

It probably took me a bit more than 5 minutes, but I had conversation last night that fits this idea.

The idea to convey is "If you don't actually use the information you obtain, it cannot possibly increase your odds of success"

I went through the Monty Hall Problem (the trick to explaining that one is to generalize to the trillion box case where all but two boxes are eliminated prior to asking whether you want to switch) to get this idea across.

From there you can explain the implications. For example, how through commitment/consistency biases, conformity, and compartmentalization its likely that they aren't actually getting the real life benefits that they could be getting from their degree in biology, or whatever it is.

I think that the key words are "reasonably smart".

Sagan’s Baloney Detection Kit is a good starting point, and it could be said that each of his examples are easily translatable to a oration of less than 5 minutes (as per Candle in the Dark), I have often thought that it would make a good children’s book (Carl and the Baloney Detector)...

A good resource would be the previous attempts at such a work, Aesop's Fables (Platitudinal), I Ching (Esoteric), and Judeo-Christi-Islamic Texts (Dogmatic). If we are to attempt a similar work for the ideas of reason then what can we learn from them to tell the aspects of how to provide a bible, or even a psalm, of reason?

It is a good starting point to keep a single idea down to what can be said before interest is lost and short enough to keep interest...

Perhaps instead of providing a single interpretation of a reasonable argument it would be a location for an argument idea, with the many interpretations of the specific argument and with related topics provided as a link?

So, in other words, Here is the Concept, These are the Arguments, This is What Concepts Relate, which could be kept to under 5 minutes.

"The WIKIRESONIA" :)

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramids_(novel\)